Some of us think of Starship Troopers as a brilliant satire, others consider it a bastardization of Robert Heinlein's novel. Scott Tobias of The Onion AV Club considers the 1997 film an apt metaphor for 21st-century nationalism and militarism.

Says Tobias:

It seems absurd now to write it off as some silly piece of escapism, as its detractors complained, and the amount of detail Verhoeven and Neumeier invest in their cinematic universe keeps cultists like myself coming back to it. [...] Each viewing seems to yield a new revelation-this time, Carmen asking Rico to "write her" via video message, suggesting an illiterate society-or something else to discuss, like the co-ed showers and military units, an intriguingly progressive sign that the battle of the sexes ended in a draw. I suspect its future is bright: The line between the world of Starship Troopers and Sarah Palin's Twitter feed gets thinner every day.